Getting the Big Picture

Bill Venners: How does the reader get the big picture of what's all there in a
wiki?

Ward Cunningham: The first thing you have to understand is that because we
made wiki easier for authors, we actually made it harder for readers. There is an organization
there, and the organization can be improved, but it isn't highly organized. So the feeling
for a reader is one of foraging in a wilderness for tidbits of information. You stumble
across some great ones and you say, "This is fantastic, why doesn't somebody just make
a list of all the great pieces so I don't have to look at the rest." In other words, "Why
doesn't somebody organize this so I can get answers to my questions quickly?" Sooner or
later they realize, "Gee, I could do that." They put in a month or two of finding what
they care about, and then they make a page, which is their take on what the organization
of wiki is.

I'm not a fan of classification. It's very difficult to come up with a classification scheme
that's useful when what you're most interested in is things that don't fit in, things that
you didn't expect. But some people decided that every
page should carry classification. They came up with a scheme, based on page names, to
establish a classification structure for a wiki. And these people who care about
classification maintain it. If someone authors a page and fails to classify it, somebody else
will say, "Oh, this should be classified as wiki maintenance or design patterns."

Bill Venners: How would they categorize a page as wiki maintenance?

Ward Cunningham: They just make a reference to a page named
WikiMaintenanceCategory. You click that link, it goes to the page that explains the
category and why the category exists. So to put a page into a category,
the convention is to put a link to a page that describes the category.
That makes the page tagged. If you want to understand what the category is, you follow
the link to the category page. If you want to see what pages are in that category, you
search for every page that references that category page.

Bill Venners: I suppose searching is one way I could begin exploring
a new wiki. In a sense a wiki is like a very small version of the internet.
Everything is all over the place. How will I find what I'm looking for? I could start by
searching with keywords.

Ward Cunningham: That's right. People decided that any wiki page whose name
ends with "Category" is a search term that's worth searching for. You might look for
fiction on Google, but if people didn't label their work fiction, you might not find it. The
category system is a set of pages that explain the rationale for the categories, and you can
read those pages. They took a small part of the namespace—all those words that end with
the word "Category"—and established the precedent that those pages talk about
categories of other pages. It's great. It's in balance. If I tried to engineer a solution, it
couldn't be as simple, or even as good. And what I love about it is, there is an active
community who manages what the set of categories are. Sometimes they get the categories
wrong, but then they correct them.